Hey there,

In this week’s edition:

• Joshua discusses whether you should buy backlinks.

• Mateusz shares how to find niche keywords in three simple steps.

• I share our SEO content strategy.

• Bill shares eight tactics to grow your email list.

✍️ New on our blog

Should You Buy Backlinks in 2022? It Depends

Link building is hard. Even if you have great content and personalize your outreach emails, many site owners will still ask for money to place a link. That’s why many SEOs prefer to just buy them.

It’s too risky in our books, though. We’ll never recommend doing this. And unless you understand and accept the risks, you shouldn’t even consider this SEO tactic.

How to Find Niche Keywords for SEO in 3 Steps

Niche keywords represent clear and specific topics that appeal to relatively small, often specialized parts of a given market. They can be an opportunity to attract highly targeted traffic in a short period of time.

How to Create an SEO Content Strategy (Follow the Ahrefs’ Framework)

Our SEO content strategy can be summarized into one sentence:

We create and maintain high-quality, search-focused content about topics with business potential, search traffic potential, and ranking potential.

8 Easy (But Effective) Ways to Grow Your Email List

Your email list is one of your business’s most important marketing assets. However, it’s not just about the raw numbers. You want the recipients to be highly engaged too. Follow Bill’s eight tried and tested tactics to grow your email list.

📚 What we’re reading

A Guide to Google Search Ranking Systems

Article by Google

Exciting news: Google has written an official guide for its ranking systems.

Using Ranking APIs to Bridge at Scale Gap Between SEO and Affiliate Performance

Slide deck by Fabrizio Ballarini

Fabrizio’s talk for the International Search Summit 2022 in Barcelona. The title of his talk does briefly explain what it’s about, but it’s still some incredibly advanced stuff.

Specification by Example and SEO

Article by Adam Gent

SEOs can find it difficult to communicate with development teams. This method—Specification by Example—can help communicate complex specifications that both business and technical teams can understand.

The SEO Metric Chain

Article by Chris Green

Chris’ metric chain shows you the progression of all the most important SEO metrics in relation to their distance from illustrating financial value.

7 Lesser-Known Resources for Ads

Twitter thread by Aazar Shad

Some useful resources to stay on top of your ads game!

Why Don’t Sales and Marketing Like Each Other?

Reddit discussion

A tale as old as time. Both can’t live without each other, yet both tend to argue a lot. Which makes me curious:

What is your personal experience as a marketer? Did you manage to align with your sales team (if you have one)? If so, how did you do it?

Till next time ;)
Cheers,